Chicken Run

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Check out some insane tactical espionage action with a fat hen in our four brand new movies.

By IGN Staff

Oddly enough, while I do happen to own a nice silk Wallace and Gromit necktie, an old birthday gift, I've never actually seen the famous animated shorts that inspired it. I don't exactly know why, since weird cartoons are a particular fascination of mine, and watching a luckless inventor stumble around in a set of oversized mechanical slacks sounds damn entertaining, but somehow they've wound up in the same limbo as Crime and Punishment, The Magnificent Ambersons, and every Black Flag album after Damaged: stuff I've always meant to check out, but somehow never gotten around to.

So it's my loss as far as cultural literacy is concerned, and it also leaves me at a bit of a disadvantage as far as Chicken Run, the big-time debut of stop-motion animators Peter Lord and Nick Park. I know it's made of clay, involves chickens going to war with their rural overseers, and appears to be weird as all hell, but as far as specifically addressing the particular style of the thing, I'm a bit adrift.

The game looks like a somewhat simpler read, though. A third-person 3D adventure, it's being developed by Blitz Games, the organization formerly known as Interactive Studio (WarGames, Glover, Firo and Klawd [sic]), which seems to have changed its name and prepared a major media campaign to push its game as one of the year's big successes. Of course, from our point of view, it's a little early to call this a home run, particularly considering that the PlayStation version of Chicken Run will lag some distance behind its cousins on the Dreamcast and PC. However, the game beneath the graphics looks like a lot of fun at this point. You are, of course, the chickens - Rocky and Ginger, to be precise - setting out to escape the Tweedy farm in a mission that incorporates stealth and action. It's like Wallace and Gromit meet Metal Gear Solid -- Chicken Gear Solid. Sorta.

Chicken Run the film is naturally a comedy, but one designed in homage to classic straight adventures like The Great Escape. Hopefully, Chicken Run the game will have a similar sort of relationship with the great games in the genre. Scenes in a TV-aired preview trailer, though they exhibited some very rough background graphics, also brought to mind the opening scenes of Metal Gear Solid, as the chickens dodged spotlights, snuck around corners, and evaded an unfriendly guard dog.

It may be a bit too much to expect a Claymation Metal Gear, but Chicken Run could easily turn out to be a cut above the average movie license, and the movie-based cinema sequences should be great fun. Blitz also has a pretty decent track record - Glover didn't quite set the world on fire, but it received a very positive critical reception. Chicken Run will arrive in time for Christmas, giving it just enough lead to accompany the home video release of the film.